Hickson / Corbett The Cannonball Kid

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-909245-22-8
Verlag: deCoubertin Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 166 Seiten

Ask any Everton fan whose allegiance stretches back to the 1950s to name their favourite player and the answer will be familiar and enthusiastically uttered: Dave Hickson. Hickson, the only man to turn out for all three Merseyside teams, captivated the city during the decade with his outrageously brave centre forward play. A swashbuckling cavalier, he played like a human battering ram, running through opposing defences with the verve of a Boy's Own hero. With his trademark blond quiff, he looked the part too. In the final months of his life, Hickson finally sat down to record his life story. From being scouted by the legendary Dixie Dean, playing in front of 70,000 plus crowds and vanquishing the mighty Manchester United, to being kicked out of an FA Cup semi final and playing under Bill Shankly this is a compelling and evocative tale of one of football's bygone era. Hickson lovingly recalls a world in which heroes lived alongside their fans and on a Saturday gave everything to bring them pride and joy. With contributions from friends and former teammates, The Cannonball Kid is a beautiful and absorbing story that, like the great man himself, is full of good humour, charm and class.

Dave Hickson was born in Salford in 1929 and brought up in Ellesmere Port. His association with Everton Football Club started as a teenager during the Second World War and over two spells, which dovetailed time at Aston Villa and Bill Shankly's Huddersfield, Hickson scored 111 goals for the club and brought light to Evertonians during one of the darkest periods in the club's history. In 1959 he joined Liverpool, a transfer that outraged fans on either side of the Merseyside divide. He subsequently played for Tranmere Rovers, in the process becoming the only footballer to play on all 'three sides of the Mersey'. Named one of Everton's Millennium Giants, he died in July 2013 following a short illness.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hickson, Dave

Corbett, James

Leseproben

INTRODUCTION

by James Corbett

This story begins not with the Cannonball Kid, but another hero – mine.

Charles Mills, or Didi as he was known by my family, was my grandfather, my inspiration, my best friend. He was a great man and a great Evertonian; the finest I ever knew. He never played or worked for the club, nor really came into close contact with its playing staff or management. But for around 80 years he attended Goodison and bred a family of Evertonians. He witnessed every Everton number nine from Dixie Dean to James Beattie (‘Beattie’ was a word he would utter with a mixture of bemusement and horror late in his life) and the club, together with the Catholic Church and his family, was a central tenet of his life.

Every football-supporting family has its Charlie Mills somewhere in its sprawling tree. Football, I learned soon after falling in love with the game as a child in the mid-1980s, is not just about what happens on the pitch. It is about tradition, shared experience, community, history. My grandfather offered a link between an Everton past that went back to the club’s virgin days in the nineteenth century when his own grandfather, an Irish immigrant from Tipperary, watched the first generation of royal blue heroes and my own son’s generation in the twenty-first century, where footballers are global icons and multimillionaires.

Evenings at Didi’s home in Crosby before a roaring fire, a glass of single malt to hand, would be spent recounting times gone by at Goodison. He attended his first game in April 1928, weeks before Dixie Dean plundered his historic 60th goal of the season. He witnessed some part of seven of Everton’s nine league titles, was at three of their five FA Cup victories – the last with me, when he was aged 70, dancing down the steps of Wembley Stadium – and by my reckoning attended at least 1,500 Everton matches. He saw every Everton great, from Dean and Ted Sagar to Tim Cahill and Mikel Arteta. He saw and experienced so much, not just in football, but in life. But it wasn’t at Wembley, or Goodison or Old Trafford or Villa Park, that he encountered some of his greatest moments as an Evertonian. It was high up on the windswept moors of East Lancashire.

Let me take you back. It is a spring night in Oldham. It is April 1953. Everton are not in a cup final, or on the brink of a league title, but ensconced in the Second Division, a dark place where they have resided for the past three seasons.

Fourteen years earlier it had been so different. Then they had won the league title with a team that included Tommy Lawton, Ted Sagar, Joe Mercer and the incomparable T.G. Jones, a man my grandfather claimed was the best player he saw in 80 years watching Everton. That team seemed set to dominate a generation. But three games into the 1939/40 season war had come and changed everything. For seven years there was no league football. My grandfather, aged 15 in 1939, came back – via Somaliland, Malaya, Egypt, Palestine and all places in between with the RAF – a man; his beloved champions returned as a diminished force.

Poor management imposed calamity on his fallen heroes. Mediocrity and then disaster followed. In the real world there was austerity, rationing, smog. The late 1940s and early 1950s were hard times in more ways than one. Then in 1951 Everton were relegated for only the second time in their history.

Just as everything seemed lost, so there came hope. Five games into life in the Second Division an outrageously brave centre forward was introduced from the reserves. With his distinctive quiff and the looks of a Boy’s Own hero, he captivated Goodison with his swashbuckling play. He was fearless, at times playing like a human battering ram. He gave people belief where there was none. His name was Dave Hickson.

He was, recounted my grandfather in a brief memoir he wrote of his years as an Evertonian, ‘inspiring, fearless – never a Dixie or a Lawton, but what a successor! The games he finished with his head covered with blood were numerous. It was just what the team needed – inspiration.’

Dave dragged a mediocre Everton team by the scruff of its neck and by April 1954 had pulled them back to the brink of where they belonged – the First Division.

Everton travelled to Oldham on the last day of the season needing a win to secure promotion. If they scored six goals they were Second Division Champions. My grandfather recalled:

In a hired charabanc with all my mates we arrived at the ground. The gates were shut and thousands were outside. The stewards were shouting, ‘Sorry lads. The ground is overcrowded already.’

For the first ‘and only’ time we joined the mob. The gates crumbled and we all entered in one mad rush, just in time to see our first goal. Another three came before half-time. Mission accomplished.

The next ‘plan’ after the game was to find a pub. Late April, it was still light, but with about 55,000 Scousers well and hell bent with the same objective it seemed hopeless. Outside one pub, with about 100 trying for admission, the manager came out. ‘No more in, lads, but I can fix you up in the back garden. Any trouble now and you’re out.’ We tipped our coach driver who, after our ‘natural agreement’, led us to the garden and kept his promise of drinking lemonade. That was until about 3am when he managed to get us out with the help of the proprietor.

It then dawned on me that 3am was the time that I started work – in Liverpool. Nemesis threatened.

I was put down in Queen Square (our then premises) to be met by my Dad – then my boss. His first words were ‘You’re late’ (It was only 3.15am) and ‘You’ve been drinking again.’ (Is the Pope a Catholic?)

One of his fellow directors came to my aid: ‘Come on Charlie – it’s only a one off.’

‘It had better be – otherwise he’s out,’ came the reply.

It had been, he recalled as he poured another whisky in his front room half a century later, ‘probably one of the greatest nights of my life’.

To my grandfather Dixie Dean may have been incomparable, Tommy Lawton his hero, Roy Vernon and Alex Young eulogised. But Dave Hickson represented something different: he restored pride in hard times and offered hope when there was none. To a young man making his way in a difficult post-war world, it meant more than anything else.

Dave graced the Everton colours for 243 games, scoring 111 goals. He is sixth among Everton’s all-time leading goalscorers. He never won anything, he never really came close to international recognition – a feat harder in an era of heroic centre forwards than it is today. He played for all three Merseyside clubs. He performed numerous heroic acts on the pitch. But the extraordinary thing about Dave Hickson was not really his feats on a football field, it was his effect on other people. People loved him, even those too young to see him play. He was idolised by a generation of fans. Everywhere he went, he was recognised, loved.

Speaking at his funeral Bill Kenwright recounted, ‘I have a big photo of him in my office and I say, “That was the man who for a lot of kids like me – post-war kids in Liverpool, frightened, a bit shy, timid – looking for a hero, we found one in Dave Hickson.”’

Even during his career, those watching him recognised that he was making history. His most famous game came on Valentine’s Day 1953, when in an FA Cup fifth round tie in front of Goodison’s second highest ever crowd, he returned to the field with a gaping head wound to score the winning goal for Second Division Everton against the League Champions, Manchester United.

On the following Monday the Liverpool Echo correspondent – foretelling my own experiences, and probably those of a generation of Evertonians – wrote in the style of a grandfather recounting a story:

I never in all my life seen a player wi’ so much guts as young Davie showed. Wi’ the blood streaming down ’is face ’e got stuck into ’is job like as if ’is very life depended on it. Twice the referee suggested ’e should go off for attention but Dave waved ’im aside just like a teetotaller refusing a drink.

Well, I’ll grant ’em Liddell were a great player, but that day our Davie were as much a match-winner as Liddell at ’is best.

That game against United is always called ’ickson’s match.

What was Dave like? It was difficult to reconcile the rabble-rouser and hard man of contemporary reports with the sweet old man that no one would say a bad word about. Even during his career, football reporters would reflect on this contradiction inherent in Hickson.

‘For a quiet, self-effacing man like Hickson to cause such controversy among fans on Merseyside is one of the most inexplicable things about him,’ were the prescient words of the Liverpool Echo’s Michael Charters in 1959. ‘Whatever Hickson did on the field he never went out from the dressing room other than determined to play the game and nothing but the game, but his enthusiasm for the cause and the idolising effect of his many fans often made for trouble.’

Certainly he had a petulant side on the pitch that was out of keeping with his modest demeanour off it. Footage of Tranmere Rovers’ 1963 FA Cup tie with...